


The Old Days

by oubliance



Category: A Place of Greater Safety - Hilary Mantel
Genre: F/M, Friendship, M/M, Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-05
Updated: 2013-02-05
Packaged: 2017-11-28 06:12:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,962
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/671191
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oubliance/pseuds/oubliance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gabrielle and Camille are unlikely allies.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Old Days

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by 5aira's recent work.
> 
> [](http://www.tracemyip.org/)

i.

Gabrielle tells herself: it’s like the old days, when Georges-Jacques loved her and Camille was poor. They could never get rid of him, chiefly because her husband didn’t want to. Camille, their shadowy third: late for meals or absent, irritating and restless, years of chaos pent within him.

After her baby dies she is tired for weeks. One humid afternoon she opens her eyes to find that he is sitting on the far side of the bed. His eyes are shut and his face ashen. Worn out by Georges-Jacques, she thinks: a familiar affliction. She feels like the baby was never born, but lost from her womb. Surely this is how a woman is after losing most of her blood?

‘Camille,’ she says, and watches him jump.

He looks at her with those unfathomable eyes. Perhaps evil, or perhaps hurt: despite the hours he spends in her apartment, she still can’t answer that one.

‘I wanted to be,’ Camille says.

If it were someone else, that ought to be the beginning of a sentence, but they’re the only words Camille can muster.

Gabrielle says, ‘Where is he?’

‘He’s still in Court.’

‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Why aren’t you with him?’

Because Georges-Jacques doesn’t want me hanging round all the time, Camille thinks. You’ve less need to be jealous than you think. He’s angry today, and he laughed. Georges-Jacques laughed at me: and not because I was being amusing.

Gabrielle stares at his silent lips. He looks so young that she wants to shake him, then give him a piece of sugar. Her mother’s old prescription for a tumbled child: and Gabrielle, after all, has never had cause to use it.

‘Why aren’t you with him?’ she says again.

Camille shrugs a little and climbs carefully off the bed.

‘I’ll ring for some lemonade,’ Gabrielle says. When Camille goes, the baby will be there: she both wants and does not.

Camille goes still, eyes fixed on her face. Then he gives an oddly tearful grimace and shakes his head.

‘I can’t.’

He observes resignedly to himself that the only time she has ever wanted him to stay, he dare not. He’s afraid of sickness. To disgust her would mean losing his frail permission to be there, and Camille has nowhere else.

Gabrielle sighs and closes her eyes again. She feels him approach her: his step is too light to make a sound. She wonders in the moment of his nearness whether propriety demands a scream, though she knows that his affections are not – do not –

Camille’s dry, hot mouth kisses her lightly on the forehead. For two or three seconds she touches his face, which is like a boy’s: of course she is used to Georges-Jacques, the only man who has touched her. The faint pulse in his throat races against her palm.

‘I’m frightened,’ he says, without meaning to. He manages not to say this out loud, as a rule.

‘So am I,’ Gabrielle says. Already she is angry that he has forced her pity, and coaxed these words from her by being present and being what he is.

‘Go on,’ she says. ‘Off you go. You must have some work to do, surely; even you – ’

Camille has no work. Who would be fool enough to employ him? Yet he is in the habit of obeying those more powerful than himself, and he doesn’t want Gabrielle to get the wrong idea. If she thinks that he wishes to take her to bed –

She couldn’t be so stupid, Camille thinks, backing away from the bed as though retiring from the company of Louis himself.

He swallows violent terror. ‘I didn’t mean – ’

‘I know,’ Gabrielle says.

Camille is an expert in reading voices: hers is angry and sorry.

He touches his own mouth where he kissed her and then turns and goes quickly away to wait until they will have him back again.

 

ii.

Gabrielle tells herself it’s like the old days.

Her body is heavier daily, and no matter how light her clothes, the perspiration soaks them. By nightfall she looks as if she’s clambered into a tub of water.

It seems unlikely that Camille and Lucile are at odds over anything. If ever a girl was bewitched, that one is: Gabrielle doesn’t believe a word of the lover-games or the rumours, not now. Yet Camille spends by no means all his time in his own apartment, and too little of it at the Convention.

Since Georges hit her, in fact, he’s been with her more and more.

If someone had told her back in ’88 or ’89 that she would spend this pregnancy, which one way or another may be her last, attended by Louise Gély and Camille, she would have thought the teller a poor lunatic fit to be shut up.

Not that Camille is what most people would deem attentive. He never asks her anything: indeed, he does not talk much and she wonders if he comes to see her because, even with the children, her apartment is quieter than his own. She never worked at her music as Lucile does, and now her hands are swollen – too swollen to sew, but she has kept all the boys’ things, for Lucile wanted everything made new. The baby won’t lack garments when it comes.

She knows that Camille knows that it’s a bad pregnancy. Her head aches often and though she’s long past the early stages now, she still vomits. She wonders whether Camille thinks she will die. He watches her a lot with his huge, bare eyes and never ventures an opinion.

In the matter of careful silence, Gabrielle reciprocates. It is sorely apparent that Camille is failing. Georges-Jacques has not noticed; if Camille talks about it with his wife, such discussions do not escape their small apartment.

Impossible to spend any notable amount of time with him and to remain unaware that something is wrong – so Gabrielle thinks, though the music of her own misfortune, playing night and day through heavy flesh, seems to have wrought her senses sharper than Danton’s. There is less and less of Camille. He is no longer merely small but in some danger, nowawadays, of genuinely disappearing. Sometimes he leans against the couch where she is lying and, looking down at him, she sees on his face the unfed, particular weariness of the very poor.

Food hurts him. When the pain is bad she holds his icy hand, but he never explains the ailment.

 

iii.

Camille is grateful to Gabrielle because she doesn’t mind if he’s too weary to amuse her and she is willing to spend a lot of time discussing Georges-Jacques. Her assessment of her husband’s character is neither bitter nor indulgent, and Camille enjoys it: what’s more, she seems to be the only person who might understand his own feelings.

To curl up on her floor, or to share her sofa, is no bad diversion.

They drink lemonade, which is a rest from his usual diet of unalloyed wine, and occasionally she touches him: like a sister, not a lover. He is scared – and loath to infect Lucile with his terror, which is physical as an ague. Gabrielle’s a different matter. She will be the first of the four of them to die: unless he is. But her condition bears a definite if unknown ending and his does not.

The three of them without her will never be perfectible: Lucile does not love Georges-Jacques, though he attracts her.

Camille finds himself surer by the day that he does not want Gabrielle to leave them, even as his conviction that she will grows more assured.

It is like the old days, but unlike them. She is brusque with him – because Camille is really too silly for his own good – but never unkind. Neither of them wants to be absent from Georges-Jacques: both fear they will have to be, and soon. Camille watches Gabrielle’s long plump hands swell until they are nearly useless. Now he arranges her hair to save her the trouble, showing a decided gift. The circles under her eyes are like old bruises. Camille thinks she is growing towards death: and he is dwindling, paying a daily private tithe of blood.

The obvious and repellent comparison often enters his thoughts. Blood and water. The pain that might as well be a spear, since it remains a mystery. He doesn’t voice this blasphemy to Gabrielle lest she smack his hand as she does the little boys’ when they are naughty.

They are a conspiracy of two. It’s still safe to use that word in one’s own mind, if not aloud.

Whichever of them is spared will get Danton through it for as long as can be managed: that is one tenet.

Another is that they will ask each other no questions.

One morning Gabrielle leans her face against her hand and when she takes it away, the faintly swollen cheek is indented with dimples that were never there before. Sometimes Camille is surprised by lavish, unexpected bleeding. There is an ignominious horror in these effusions, and he is grateful for Gabrielle's silence.

‘When I was a little girl, I had dreams about being married,’ Gabrielle says.

Camille looks up at her.

‘So did I,’ he says at last.

Gabrielle knows he doesn’t mean Lucile: although he loves her.

‘I used to dream about a veil,’ he says. ‘I’m not sure where that came from. Weddings in Guise weren’t too grand.’

‘What sort of veil?’

‘A beautiful one,’ Camille says. ‘I always had rather bad eyes, you know. About as bad as Max’s, only spectacles are uncomfortable.’ He lays his cheek against the edge of the sofa. ‘I would see the inside of the veil, close-up. But never my – the person I was going to marry.’

Gabrielle strokes his curls with her sore hand.

‘I dreamt of marrying a handsome gentleman,’ she says. Her voice is soft, as though she is telling a story. ‘He had fair hair, in most of the dreams. Sometimes he was a Comte, or an Englishman – a peer.’

‘Lucile wanted to be Mary Stuart.’

‘She still wants to,’ Gabrielle says, not unkindly, and Camille laughs for a moment.

‘Go on,’ he says.

‘He gave me a white horse.’

‘Georges could do that,’ Camille begins.

Gabrielle says, ‘Hush. This wasn’t any old horse, Camille.’

Camille is suddenly on the edge of tears. If only, he thinks, dying people could always be dull and unkind. It would make things much easier.

He says, ‘Gabrielle – ’

Gabrielle hears her name broken into its component parts: as if Camille’s voice knew more than any of them.

‘Don’t,’ she says.

Camille skims each black eye with a finger. Then he hides his face in the silk sofa.

‘Tell me,’ he says. ‘Please.’

‘He gave me a white horse,’ Gabrielle says. ‘The dreams often began with rising in the morning, early, and putting on a habit. We’d go out into the dew and the horses were being held by their groom. My husband would help me to mount. As we reached the boundaries of the estate, the sun would come up. Then it was open country.’

She hears Camille swallow and touches his sharp, frail shoulder.

‘But the season changed every time,’ she says. ‘That’s why I like Fabre’s months. Sometimes it was a winter landscape, very bare, and a cold bright sky. And then other times, the apple blossom, and campion on the verges when we came to a road.’

His fingers are blindly pleating her soft skirt.

‘And betony in the meadows,’ she says. ‘I remember that particularly. It was such a funny flower to dream about, but I can see it now – the horses’ hooves crushing it into the grass.’

 

_fin._

**Author's Note:**

> \- In this story, Gabrielle has untreated pre-eclampsia; Camille has untreated Crohn's disease.  
> \- Common names for betony include self-heal and heal-all.


End file.
